Not quite five minutes later they were nearing the exit beside the security queues and the escalator down to the strip of exterior sidewalk where they would wait for the hotel shuttle, when Jada stopped and handed Megan her phone. The entire crew stopped with her, a herd of gazelle on alert.
“Recognize him?” Jada asked.
Megan enlarged the photo with her index finger and thumb. “Oh, my God,” she murmured softly, a little stunned. “Wow. He was on the flight with us from Paris to Dubai.”
“Yup.”
Megan gave the phone to Cassie, but didn’t say a word.
For a long moment she stared at the photo, and it was one of those experiences where she was both reacting to it viscerally and reacting to it with the awareness of a performer because she knew that Megan was watching her. There he was. Last night’s lover. The story about him was on a site they all visited on occasion that helped international travelers keep up with international crime, a sort of tabloid version of the State Department’s travel advisory website. It was brief and to the point: there had been a rather grisly murder at the Royal Phoenician in Dubai. The victim, a hedge fund manager from the United States named Alex Sokolov, had had his throat slashed in his hotel room. He had been found midafternoon when he had missed a meeting he had been expected to attend. Finally hotel security had ignored the “Do Not Disturb” sign and entered the suite. There were no other names in the story, so there was no mention of a woman named Miranda.
“I am so sorry,” Cassie said, hoping that her shock that the body now was news would be construed by Megan and the crew as shock that the body existed at all—that the poor guy had been murdered. She scrolled down a little further and learned that the authorities had no serious suspects. A travel and tourism official was insisting that this was an isolated incident and visitors needn’t be alarmed, but a police captain seemed to dispute that by arguing that they had not ruled out burglary as a motive.
Megan took the phone and gave it back to Jada, and she in turn handed it to Stewart and the captain to share. It was interesting to all of them that a passenger on their plane had been murdered. Then Megan leaned in close to Cassie and whispered, “Swear to me you know nothing about this.”
“Of course not. Why would I?” She hoped that she sounded offended.
“Okay. It’s just that you two were talking a lot on the flight to Dubai. And then you seemed so off your game and so freaking weird when we were on our way to the airport this morning. And then you were crying when we took off.”
She shook her head. “Oh, I guess I’m sad that the young man is dead. He seemed like a nice enough guy. But the last time I saw him was when he got off the plane yesterday afternoon.”
The herd started to move and she started to move with it. A part of her feared that each lie was going to bury her deeper. But she also told herself that it was far too late to start telling the truth.
* * *
? ?
Cassie lay on her side in her hotel room bed in the dark, naked but for the white terrycloth robe she had found in the closet. She listened to the sounds of the footsteps and the rolling suitcases along the corridor, flinching whenever she heard a door slam or a lock click shut. She tried once more to recall missing details from the night before, but they were lost. She tried to recall every word she had said to Miranda. But so much of the conversation existed in the murk that shrouded the events and the men and the bars and the beds from so many nights over so many years.
At one point she considered texting her sister in Kentucky. Asking a few harmless questions about her nephew or niece. About her brother-in-law.
She and her sister rarely spoke of their father and mother, because invariably they wound up fighting whenever they did. There was just so much anger and just so much hurt, and they had responded to their parents in ways as different and unique as snowflakes. They were not close anymore and probably never would be close again, but Rosemary needed Cassie to be at least on the periphery of her family’s life to feed her own longing for normalcy. Occasionally, Rosemary and her husband, Dennis, and their two kids would fly in from Kentucky and stay at an inexpensive hotel in Westchester for the weekend, and then take the train or drive a rental car into the city on Saturday and Sunday. Rosemary was an accountant in Lexington. Dennis worked at the military base in Richmond. Sometimes on these family visits to the city Cassie would be granted a brief audience alone with either her nephew or niece. She would be allowed to bring Jessica to the American Girl Store or Tim to the Metropolitan Museum. A few times she had even gotten to take the children to lunch, just the three of them, and she had brought them to restaurants they had adored—the sort of places where there were young waiters and waitresses singing show tunes or the dining room was designed to replicate a haunted house. Cassie cherished those hours: she couldn’t imagine she was ever going to have children of her own, a reality that some solitary nights would leave her feeling bereft of the son or daughter she’d never hold. Usually, however, when her sister’s family came to New York, she would see the kids and their parents together. The five of them would go to the top of the Empire State Building. The Statue of Liberty. Yankee Stadium when the Royals were in town, so together they could root against the Evil Empire.
These weekends were free of alcohol because Rosemary didn’t drink and didn’t want to see her sister drink. That’s how different they were.
It spoke volumes about what Rosemary really thought of her that the children had never been alone with Cassie in her apartment. She had offered to babysit them at least half a dozen times so Rosemary and Dennis could enjoy a night out alone. See a musical, perhaps, that wasn’t Disney. Enjoy a restaurant where the ladies’ and men’s rooms didn’t have signs marked “Witches” and “Warlocks.” But her sister had always passed. Said she and Dennis wanted family time with the kids. In truth, Cassie knew, Rosemary didn’t trust her at night. It was when their father often (but not always) got into trouble, and it was when Cassie seemed to inflict the most hurt—on herself and on others.
And so she didn’t text her sister. There was really no point. She didn’t once reach for her phone as it charged on the nightstand. She was afraid that the urge to Google Alex Sokolov would be irresistible, and now that she knew his body had been found and the investigation had begun, she wanted to secrete herself inside a news void. She was afraid that anything she might learn would only make her feel worse. Either it would frighten her, a noose drawing tight, or it would exacerbate her guilt for telling no one that she’d found him dead and then just left the body behind. That night she only got out of bed when she needed water or had to go to the bathroom.
* * *
? ?
She awoke, the air dense with the distant remnants of a dream. The room was silent except for the thrum of the cool, forced air, and the details of the dream were all but gone. Her father was in it, that she knew, and so was hunting camp. But that was it.